"The Last Emperor" Part Two
While at high school, Kim Jong Il had a close friend whose older brother was married to a particularly attractive young woman, Sung Hae Rim. At the time she was 19. Kim noticed her beauty, as teenage boys do, but nothing came of it until he graduated from college and, while working at the central committee, immersed himself in a passion that would remain with him for the rest of his life: movies. He often visited Pyongyang's main film studio to watch movies and visit sets. He would later receive credit for producing at least a half dozen films and musicals, and he wrote two books, ''On the Art of Cinema'' and ''Kim Jong Il on the Art of Opera'' (both works are sold at Amazon.com).
During one visit to the studio, he again noticed Sung Hae Rim, who had become an actress and was usually cast in the role of a heroine. One thing led to another, and Kim fell in love. Inconveniently, Sung Hae Rim was married and had a child, but according to her sister, Sung Hae Rang, who defected in 1996 and recently published a memoir in Korean, Kim forced Sung to leave her husband and live with him.
It was a strange and tragic situation. Kim could not marry Sung because of her previous marriage, her child and the fact that she was six years his senior; in a Confucian society, a match of that sort would be frowned upon, especially for a man who was to inherit a nation. Kim did not even feel safe telling his strait-laced father about his new love; the affair could bump him off the fast track to succession.
According to Sung Hae Rang's memoir, which is called ''Wisteria House,'' her sister was moved to one of Kim's secluded villas and rarely traveled outside of it. In 1971, she became pregnant. This posed a logistical inconvenience, because Kim could not visit the hospital where she gave birth. To do so would reveal to prying eyes that he was the father of an illegitimate child.
Sung's sister wrote that Kim and Sung arranged a covert system to inform him of his child's birth and its sex. Kim parked his car outside the hospital every night she was there and flicked his lights on and off to signal that it was he. Once the baby was born, Sung signaled back the birth of the child and its sex by flicking the room's light on and off in a prearranged sequence.
The child was a boy, and he was named Kim Jong Nam. Within a few years of his birth, Sung Hae Rim began suffering insomnia and other nervous disorders. She was sent to Moscow for treatment at sanitariums and spent most of the remainder of her life there; she died in Russia in 2002. When her sister left for Moscow, Sung Hae Rang was put in charge of the boy's upbringing. Though it became known in Pyongyang that he was Kim Jong Il's son, Kim Jong Nam remained cloistered at different villas and was eventually sent with Song Hae Rang and her son, Lee Il Nam, to Geneva, where Kim Jong Nam was enrolled at a private school. Lee Il Nam disappeared from Geneva and emerged later in Seoul. He wrote a memoir about his life in the Dear Leader's household, and in 1997 he was killed in what South Korean officials say was an assassination by North Korean agents.
The palace intrigue had other chapters. Kim Il Sung became aware of Kim Jong Il's affair and disapproved of it. In the early 70's, he ordered his son to marry Kim Young Sook, the daughter of a senior military official. Although Kim Jong Il does not spend much time with his ''official'' wife, she has remained loyal to him. She is not considered a power broker. She bore a daughter by Kim; the daughter has played no role in politics.
Kim soon fell for yet another woman, Ko Young Hee, a dancer who caught his eye when her troupe performed at one of his parties. A delicate beauty, she was from a family of Koreans who had lived in Japan and immigrated to North Korea in the 1960's. Kim could not wed her -- he was already married, after all -- so he housed her in still another of his villas. She soon bore him two sons, and last year she was spoken of publicly -- and favorably -- in the North Korean media, suggesting that her sons were rising in official esteem. Early this month, however, a Japanese newspaper reported that Ko Young Hee was seriously injured in a car crash.
In 2001, Kim Jong Nam was detained at Narita airport, outside Tokyo, as he was trying to enter the country with two women and a 4-year-old boy on a fraudulent passport from the Dominican Republic. He said he just wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland. He was expelled to China. Because, in part, of this embarrassment, Kim Jong Nam is no longer considered a front-runner for succession; two North Korea watchers in Seoul told me that he lives in China and is afraid to return to North Korea. It now appears that Kim Jong Chul, 22, the Dear Leader's son by his mistress Ko Young Hee, is first in line for succession.
At 8 in the morning on July 26, 2001, a five-car train rolled into Khasan, which is on the Russian side of the border between Russia and North Korea. A carpeted platform was brought to the main car, and when its door opened, Kim Jong Il emerged, waving and smiling to the officials assembled at the station. Kim was embarking on the longest foreign trip in his adult life, a 24-day rail odyssey across Russia.
Journalists scrambled to various cities on the itinerary -- Khabarovsk, Omsk, St. Petersburg and Moscow -- hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious North Korean. Few of them succeeded, because Kim was kept far apart from inquiring eyes. He traveled in an armored rail car, with a locomotive seven minutes ahead to make sure the track was safe and another locomotive several minutes behind to make sure nobody could commandeer a train and ram it into the rear of the Dear Leader's caravan.
For the Russians who escorted Kim, the trip offered the first prolonged encounter foreigners would have with him. The informal silence about the trip lasted for more than a year, until Konstantin Pulikovsky, a presidential envoy who headed the Russian delegation escorting Kim, published a memoir in Russian about the journey. This led other officials to discuss it, including Georgy Toloraya, a diplomat who had been based in North Korea and speaks fluent Korean.
The Dear Leader, it turns out, does not travel third class. His train was stocked with live lobster, French wine and fresh pastries, and his entourage included four young women who entertained him and his companions by singing songs in Korean and Russian. One car was a meeting room with two flat-panel screens, one for films (videos of military parades were among his favorites) and the other for a satellite-updated map of the train's progress, much like the ones in airplane cabins.
Kim visited an array of sites, including a pig farm, a brewery, a space firm and the Hermitage Museum. He even went to a department store in Khabarovsk, where he stopped at the perfume department and asked where the scents came from. He spent a few minutes in the beauty salon and also visited the sports department, where skis and sportswear were sold; he rubbed the fabrics to assess their quality. In the men's-wear department, he inquired why some pants had cuffs and some didn't, and he seemed surprised at the cost of Italian shoes -- about $400.
''Do people here really buy such expensive shoes?'' he asked.
For the Russians, Kim's rail odyssey confirmed what they had been thinking of the Dear Leader -- that he is smart and wants to reform his country's failed economy, but does not wish to lose power. ''When I read somewhere that he is a madman who doesn't understand what he is doing -- that is laughable stuff,'' said Toloraya, the Russian diplomat who was on the train and met Kim on several dozen occasions. Toloraya is now the Russian consul general in Sydney, and I interviewed him on the phone. ''He is a professional in state governance. What he does is very well prepared. It would be a mistake to think of him as an impossible, unpredictable character. He is an emotional person, but he is a professional. He knows what he is doing. He plans several steps ahead.''
The Russians weren't the only ones getting to know the charms and wishes of the Dear Leader. Kim's coming-out to the rest of the world included, in October 2000, an unprecedented visit to North Korea by an American delegation led by Secretary of State Albright. This was in the waning days of the Clinton administration, before the 1994 nuclear agreement fell apart, and Albright wanted to sound out Kim on a plan for ending his missile-production program; Kim, in return, wanted Clinton to visit Pyongyang.
The Americans were in for some surprises.
The North Koreans had promised that Albright would see Kim, but when she arrived in Pyongyang, her schedule did not include a meeting with him. Her delegation was whisked into the city in the early morning, to the guest house where they would stay, and shortly afterward they were taken on a tour that many foreign visitors go through in Pyongyang, highlighted -- that may not be the right word -- by a visit to the tomb of Kim Il Sung.
At lunch, Albright was abruptly told she would meet Kim in the afternoon. The delegation was driven to his guest house, and as Albright stood in front of a huge mural depicting a storm at sea, Kim walked in, greeting her with both hands extended forward. They were about the same height, Albright in her heels and Kim in his platform shoes.
He poured on the charm. Kim asked Albright if she had seen any recent films, and when she replied ''Gladiator,'' Kim said he had seen ''Amistad,'' which he described as ''very sad.'' He proudly told Wendy Sherman, who was in Pyongyang as special adviser to Clinton on North Korea: ''I own all the Academy Award movies. I've watched them all.''
Smart as he is, Kim lives in a different world and doesn't always realize it. One evening, the Albright delegation was shepherded into a stadium in Pyongyang, where they were seated next to Kim. For the next two hours the Americans were treated to a ''mass game'' -- a fantasia of synchronized gymnastics on the stadium floor and card-turning displays on the opposite side of the stadium. The exactitude of these ''games'' is terrifying. They are often staged on important national occasions; dignitaries from friendly countries were invited to a particularly spectacular display to mark Kim Jong Il's birthday last year. I attended a mass game display in Pyongyang in 1989, and the sensation a Westerner feels is not artistic appreciation but totalitarian horror.
One card montage performed for Albright showed a North Korean missile being launched into the sky. It was an odd display for Americans who were negotiating a cessation of missile production and research. But Kim, ever the showman, turned to Albright on his right and said, ''That was our first missile launch and our last.'' To make sure his message got through, he turned to Sherman on his left and repeated his statement. The meaning was clear: the missile program can be stopped if you offer us a new relationship. ''This was totally orchestrated, the cards and turning to us,'' Sherman said when I spoke with her at the Washington office of the Albright Group, a consulting firm. ''For all I know, that was the purpose of taking us to the stadium.''
Albright and Sherman returned to Washington convinced that Kim Jong Il's stated intentions should be put to the test: he should be offered a new relationship with the U.S. government, including a visit by Clinton to North Korea, if he was willing to submit to a verifiable agreement on halting missile research, production, deployment and exports. This was a position that critics would certainly attack as appeasement, but for Albright and Sherman, it was a price worth paying to end the North Korean missile threat.
''I have no illusions about Kim,'' Sherman said. ''He's charming but totally controlling. He is a leader who has left his people with no freedom, no choices, no food, no future. People are executed. There are labor camps. But the decision we have to make is whether to try to deal with him to open the country so that the people of North Korea do have freedom, do have choices, do have food. Do I think it would be preferable to not deal with him? Yes, but the consequences are horrible, so you have to deal with him.''
The clock ran out. There wasn't enough time before Clinton left office to negotiate the agreements that would need to be in place before Air Force One could take off for North Korea. The momentum halted with the advent of the Bush administration. But now, with the second round of six-party talks nearing, the Americans are trying to figure out once again whether and how to deal with Kim.
hoe Hak Rae, the former newspaper publisher, remains hopeful. The way he sees it, Kim Jong Il knows his economy has failed and wants to reform it. Signs of change in the north are already evident: some prices have been deregulated, farmers' markets have been established and North Korean officials have been dispatched to foreign countries to learn about business. The bear wants to get out of its cage, Choe says. ''The more he is regarded as the worst person of the century, the more he will become a dangerous man,'' Choe told me. ''But if safety and security are guaranteed for himself and North Korea, I don't think he will be a danger.''
Wendy Sherman is more cautious, but she and other advocates of engagement say that Kim believes, erroneously, that he can control the tempo and impact of opening up to the rest of the world. It is not clear yet whether her point of view has much traction in the Bush administration, which veers from warlike hostility to occasional murmurs of peaceful coexistence if Kim disarms.
The notion that a dictator like Kim can be coaxed to reform has no real historical precedent. The most notable totalitarian regimes of the modern era -- the ones developed by Stalin in the Soviet Union and by Mao Zedong in China -- were not reformed by the men who shaped them. Reform of such states requires a degree of repudiation that the authors of failure are loath to tolerate, mostly out of fear for their own survival. In essence, proponents of engagement hope Kim will begin a process that will lead to his downfall. It seems doubtful that he will be sufficiently selfless or stupid to do that.
The disarmament question is even stickier. The administration has waged two pre-emptive wars on countries it deemed to be enemies -- Afghanistan and Iraq. It does not require Kissingerian smarts to calculate that a member of the axis of evil would be death-wish foolish to relinquish the weapons of mass destruction that may be the only thing, by virtue of the horrible implications of their use, that stands in the way of an American attack. The real issue isn't whether Kim is crazy enough to amass a nuclear arsenal but whether he is crazy enough to dispossess himself of his one bargaining chip.
What is the solution? I decided to seek out a man who knows Kim Jong Il better than anyone else outside North Korea: Hwang Jang Yop. Hwang was the Karl Rove of North Korea for more than three decades, creating the ideology of Juche, or self-sufficiency, that was the bedrock of Kim Il Sung's regime and remains in place today -- though in name only, since North Korea depends on foreign aid for its survival. Working at the center of the regime, Hwang learned what Kim Jong Il wants, what he can do and what he will not do.
n a Saturday morning in August, I went with my interpreter to a private club in Seoul, where I met Cho Gab Je, a prominent conservative journalist who edits a magazine, the Monthly Chosun, that is known for its hard-hitting coverage of North Korea. We got into a sedan and drove to an office building in a suburb of the city; Cho is friendly with Hwang and arranged for me to meet him. I agreed to not provide details of the building or its location, other than to say that the anteroom is guarded by a number of armed security agents and that you must pass through a metal detector before entering Hwang's office. Hwang's caution is understandable: North Korea is believed to have agents in the South who would be eager to silence their homeland's most famous traitor.
Hwang is 80 and hard of hearing; I sat in an armchair to his immediate left. He is small and thin and was dressed in a dark blue suit and blue tie. He is not particularly warm with visitors or, it would seem, with anybody. Though he lived a privileged life in North Korea -- he had a phone at his home, ample food and a car, and he traveled extensively outside the country -- his defection has brought doom onto his family. His wife is rumored to have committed suicide after his defection, as did his daughter, who is said to have jumped out of a bus that was taking her to a prison camp. It is assumed that his other children and grandchildren are in prison camps, if they are still alive.
He does not talk about his personal life, but he does talk about the Dear Leader.
''If I were to go into details, it would take many days,'' he said. ''As a politician or leader who can work for the development of the state and the happiness of the people, he is an F student, a dropout. But as a dictator he has an excellent ability. He can organize people so that they can't move, can't do anything, and he can keep them under his ideology. As far as I know, the present North Korean dictatorial system is the most precise and thorough in history.''
Hwang says that he believes foreign aid has helped Kim by providing the resources he needs to retain the loyalty of his core constituencies -- the military and party elites. Hwang says he does not believe Kim would ever allow foreign aid and investment to benefit the people who need it; Kim has shown no interest in his people's material well-being, and given the choice between regime survival and national prosperity, it's pretty clear which he would prefer. A few years ago, Kim began letting South Koreans visit the north, and this was seen as a relaxation of the isolation of his information-starved subjects. But the tourists, whose visits provide much-needed hard currency to the regime, are shepherded in quarantinelike conditions that make them virtual prisoners; contact with ordinary North Koreans is nil. Hwang says outsiders are naive to believe that Kim is ready to open up his country.
''South Korea is being fooled, and the Chinese, who should know best,'' he said. ''A considerable number of people are being fooled, including the United States.''
Hwang's synopsis of Kim's dictatorship reminded me of a passage from his memoir. He wrote about a 1992 banquet that Kim presided over in Pyongyang; a dance troupe provided lavishly choreographed entertainment.
The performance ''was enough to elicit disgust when seen through the eyes of people with healthy minds,'' Hwang wrote, recalling that he nonetheless applauded vigorously for the entertainers. A professor who was next to him was flummoxed.
''Are you clapping because you really enjoy the performance?'' the professor asked.
''It doesn't matter,'' Hwang replied. ''Just clap like mad. It's an order.''
Kim's hold on power depends not only on his willingness to impose misery upon his people but also on the willingness of the North Korean elite to accept their privileges and say nothing. Many North Koreans are well aware of the repressed and backward state of their homeland and wish it were otherwise; recent visitors say North Koreans quietly express a desire for greater contact with the outside world. The problem is that none of them are prepared to force or even nudge their wishes upon Kim Jong Il. The Dear Leader understands, as smart tyrants do, that perpetual clapping is generated by terror. That is why he works 20 hours a day to make sure the applause of fear does not stop.
When his regime is brought to an end, as one day it will be, the cause will not be his napping. Kim has had plenty of time, and he has worked hard, to insulate himself from the type of events that have led to the collapse of other tyrannies and dynasties. But the downfall of dictators is unpredictable. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of its Eastern European brethren, the easing of Maoist discipline in China -- these happened in ways that were not foreseen. It is very likely, too, that the unimaginable will get Kim Jong Il in the end.
In Lockstep
In June 2002, the Japanese photographer Koichiro Otaki was given a rare opportunity to photograph the ''mass games,'' choreographed performances that were held to celebrate the 60th birthday of Kim Jong Il. The games, held in the gigantic May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, involved more than 100,000 participants, mostly students; they took place six days a week for two months. Dancers on the field performed elaborate and precisely coordinated routines, while people in the stands held up intricate sequences of colored cards to create huge mosaiclike images.
Peter Maass, a contributing writer, last reported for the magazine from Iraq.
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